Pheasant’s Back

I was having one of those writer's blocks, those moments where you want or need to write something, but your brain feels empty and unfocused. Usually something happens during the week that gives me a thought or an idea and I store it in the back of my head until I start writing. But this time it just wasn't there. Jenelle suggested that I write something like “sorry, but I have writer's block or brain freeze or whatever, and that I will be back in a few weeks or months or whenever the thing goes away”.

Now the reference “brain freeze” rang the bell! Ding, ding, ding!

Yesterday I found a pheasant's back mushroom. It has other names too, and it's in the same mushroom family as chicken of the woods. But it's not my favorite. I tried one about fifteen years ago and after just one bite I decided that they look right nice growing on the side of a tree, and so that's where I’d leave them. They have this cucumbery smell and almost a fruity taste which doesn't even sound good fried in butter. 

But it had been fifteen years or so, and so I cut it off of the tree, brought it home and looked for a better way to prepare it.

There are other ways to prepare it and one suggestion on the Internet was to cook them with strawberries and rhubarb and then to smother a big ole gob of ice cream with the concoction. They claimed it to be one of the best desserts out there! Now that sounds pretty good to me! I've never had a bad bowl of ice cream. I've had ramp ice cream which tasted great. Ice cream with maple syrup is always good. I discovered that coffee poured over double dunker ice cream and shared with friends is a great thing! And Jenelle made some rhubarb and tapioca last week that was absolutely wonderful lathered over a big scoop of ice cream. 

The pheasant's back and rhubarb and strawberries sounded good to me, but really, the rhubarb and the strawberries without the pheasant's back did too, and adding the pheasant's back might ruin a good thing.

So I just cut off a couple slivers and threw them in the frying pan with butter and salt. After all, that's the best way to prepare any mushroom. I offered everyone a bite. We all had the same earthy mushroom expectation. But what everyone got, including me was the same reaction. Yuck! And when I offered a second bite to the boys, all I got was, “I'm good.” 

For those of you that don't know, that's the modern day teenager way of saying, “no thank you, what you are offering has no way of betterment to my life, so please don't ask again”. 

Cooking up rhubarb with the pheasant’s back seemed like a lot of work and so I set the mushroom off on the side of the kitchen counter thinking I would toss it out this morning. But now I'm sitting here looking at the mushroom and thinking about brain freeze, ice cream, pheasant's back mushrooms, and about what to write. Is that recipe with rhubarb and strawberries and pheasant’s back as delicious as the writer made it sound? Am I a fool for just writing it off? Is “I'm good” a good thing? Or could there be something better?

What do I write in my journal? What do mushrooms have to do with people, with life, with God? 

There's lots of people out there that are “cooked” just right and I like them. 

And sometimes I feel like I'm the mushroom that's best left growing on the side of a tree. 

When it comes to life and God, sometimes I wonder, would I be better off if I dug a little deeper and got out of the rut of thinking and doing the same things over and over?

Often we turn up our noses to things that don't seem to fit into our mold of how we do things. Or we give it a half hearted try and say, "I told you so”. Maybe today's a good day to try to do things a little differently. Maybe I'll slice up that mushroom. After all, you can't go wrong with ice cream!